| Case
Study: Data
Conversion Software Development Project |
The
Task
|
The
Department of Labor wanted a software application that would allow institutions
of higher education extract their course offering database and translate
it into a structure and format that could easily be uploaded to the ALX
database. There was great variety in the format of each institutions data
|
The
Client
|
The
U.S. Department of Labor, America's Learning eXchange (ALX) is a national
online college course catalog resource for students and people interested
in continuing education.
|
The
Situation
|
ALX
needed a way for thousands of higher education providers to simply and repeatably
take course offering information from any of these providers and convert
them into a structure and format compatible with the national ALX database.
Although the formats and databases varied widely, they could all easily
create a flat file extract that could be remapped into the proper field
structure needed in ALX. Special care would be needed for missing field
data and the automatic entering of default information.
|
The
Action
|
We developed
an application in Visual Basic and Microsoft Access that would allow owners
of the data to easily translate all the pertinent information to the national
database from any flat file or Excel spreadsheet. This tool was distributed
on a CD-ROM and given to collaborating schools. This software was named
ALX CourseLink.
|
The
Results
|
| This software
was developed, tested and released within an eight week period. It was used
in adding hundreds of thousands of new and current course records to the
national ALX database. This CourseLink tool was also included in the promotional
CD-ROM the Department of Labor used to market the launch of this new capability. |